A New frontier for businesses to win big: Chatbots

Gartner Predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. It is inevitable that Chatbots will be dominant contributors in this 85% by facilitating conversation between businesses and customers. Rising Google trend charts around chatbots are also an embodiment of rising interest in chatbot’s applications.

Chatbots, also know as Chatterbots are already catering to billions of customer queries on various internet-based services. Real-time functioning of Chatbots is helping these consumer-facing businesses to cut down on response time greatly. Chatbots are inherently built to give users a personalized experience. This is proving to be a crucial factor in exponential and most importantly, positive adoption by users.

Be it flight booking, train booking or providing help about banking services on banking websites, businesses are leveraging chatbots. Looking around, it seems prophecy by Gartner might come true even before 2020.

While it is proven that Chatbots are competent to handle customer service part very well, it needs to be explored that if they can solve other diverse business and operational problems as well.

Training resource woes: Chatbots to rescue

On this exploratory quest, we at Ellicium came across some unique use cases. Just to mention one, we replaced a resource-intensive corporate training program with an exclusive Chatbot. This business had to shell out a huge amount to get these corporate training done for new recruits. This incurred cost was not yielding expected result as a trainee would still need to refer huge printed material later for seeking answers. After incorporating Chatbot, all these issues are dusted. Above all, the knowledge base is available to everyone 24/7 with a personalized experience. Training support center manpower cost is now reduced by almost 30%. All thanks to chatbots!

This one use-case proves that Chatbots can solve unique problems if areas are recognized creatively. Business executives might be skeptical, and certainly, there are some challenges which can be show stoppers to adopt Chatbots.

These are some critical challenges as listed below:

Linking the crucial applications and syncing them with the Chatbot

Having layers of conversation without asking too many cross-questions to the user

Uplifting brand image and bringing a personalized approach

Managing and Holding Chatbot applications

Making sure the conversation is secured and private

Keeping up with incremental training of knowledgebase

Cost

Chatbots can help to overcome these challenges! Below are some of the features.

fig. 1 – Features of chatbots

Overcoming all these challenges to build robust Chatbots at a rapid pace is something we do at Ellicium. We have predefined templates and framework to make this happen. We are also empowering chatbots with Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to tramp over these challenges successfully.

Finding the right problem to solve for Chatbots

Though Chatbots can be used for a wide variety of applications, they can be very effective with ‘knowledge’ driven business use cases. This also holds true for those tasks which are repetitive in nature or tasks which require business users to dabble through tons of information to find an answer. Regular tasks which are resource intensive and transactional in nature can also be effectively done by Chatbots.

Chatbots are major efficiency boosters. Even a simple task of fetching reports may require dedicated human resources. Such mundane tasks, if needed to be done at scale, can prove to be fatal for overall organizational efficiency. Chatbots can be real saviors here!

Organizations on the verge of scaling up, need to ramp up their capabilities with respect to everything. You can always put chatbots in lead to scale operational tasks like human resource policy dispensation/ training to your new recruits. An important aspect of Chatbot that needs to be considered here is that it has the ability to handle multiple users at one go!

Once you find a task worthy of deploying Chatbots, it is always better to start small and capitalize on the success. Create a small ‘power’ user group who will test Chatbot thoroughly before rolling out to everyone. Their feedback is crucial. Incorporating this feedback will for sure enrich your Chatbot to serve you better.

The chatbot ecosystem is ever evolving! Hence, this is just a beginning. To reiterate, businesses need to start looking at creative solutions like Chatbots to scale, to compete in global markets, and to win!